The mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karic, said that she was surprised by the statement of the new mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Sapic, who said that he did not know about the war crimes of convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic.
As Karic stressed, the mayor of the city of Belgrade and the doctor of science as Mayor Sapic presents himself should be familiar with the basics of international criminal law and the judgments of the International Tribunal for war crimes committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia.
“He should know that the International Mechanism for Criminal Courts issued a second-instance verdict confirming the life sentence of Ratko Mladic, former general of the Republika Srpska (RS) Army, for genocide in Srebrenica, persecution of Bosniaks and Croats, terrorizing the citizens of Sarajevo and taking the United Nations (UN) members hostage, “ stated Karic.
Taking into account the large amount of ignorance and lack of information, adds Karic, the City Administration of the City of Sarajevo will officially deliver the court verdicts that should be read, because as he himself said, he was not in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during that time, so he does not know what happened.
“But there are institutions that were there and know everything. The mayor can get more information at the Information Center on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which is located in the City Hall,” Karicemphasized.
To recall, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia asked the new mayor of Belgrade to remove the mural with the image of war criminal Ratko Mladic, to which he replied that “he does not know whether Mladic committed crimes during the war, but he knows that he defended the Serbian people.”
“I don’t know who did what during the war in Bosnia, because I wasn’t there. What I do know is that Ratko Mladic defended the Serbian people and probably if it weren’t for him, Serbs from Bosnia would have ended up like Serbs from Croatia. They would have been killed and eventually expelled from their hearths. Whether he committed war crimes during the war, I really don’t know,” said Sapic, Klix.ba writes.
E.Dz.
